By Ron Fassler . . .
Actor-Director Brandon J. Dirden has made something of a home for himself at Red Bank’s Two River Theatre over the past decade or so. A New Jersey resident himself, he has acted and directed in nearly a dozen plays there. A quick trip outside Manhattan, conveniently within walking distance of the NJ Transit train that drops you off a block away, Two River is a go-to place for diverse and quality work. I still consider an all-male version of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which I saw in 2015 with Christopher Fitzgerald and Michael Urie, one of the best productions of that musical I’ve ever seen (Kimberly Akimbo’s Jessica Stone directed). Currently, Dirden has his director’s cap on for Arthur Miller’s The Price, which premiered in 1968 and has been the recipient of four Broadway revivals since then. There’s a reason for that: it’s a terrific play. Though Miller’s reputation has been burnished by better-known titles such as Death of a Salesman, All My Sons, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge, the lesser known Price belongs in that august group every bit as much. Its story of two long-estranged brothers, who come together when the building they grew up in has been sold and their father’s possessions need to be dispensed with, is one of bottled up resentments aligned with painful memories.
In a discussion this week, I spoke with Dirden about his attraction to The Price and what he hopes audiences will take home from spending two hours with the four characters who inhabit Miller’s play, still set in 1968, and what it has to say nearly sixty years later.
Ron Fassler: What drew you to The Price? Did Two River choose the play, or did you?
Brandon J. Dirden: I’ve had an interest in Miller always. I just think he’s the master of the conundrum. “You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t, but you gotta do!” Matter of fact, whenever I read Miller or see a Miller play, I get a churning in the stomach that is inevitable because these characters don’t know that they’re going to have their lives changed irrevocably. But it’s so human, right? So, I’ve always been a fan of Miller for that reason. And I’m so happy that when Justin Waldman [artistic director of Two River] brought this to me and I read it for the first time, I didn’t know why but it was just something that worked its way into my being on a cellular level. It’s not a flashy play, of course. It’s not a big title and it doesn’t have the scope or the ambition of some of Miller’s other work. It’s a small four-hander with all continuous action and iit just needled its way under my skin.
RF: For this production, did you consider a different take on the ethnicities of the characters in The Price in any way?
BJ: I’m going to be really frank with you on this one. In early discussions with Justin about casting he said, “Listen, let’s explore this as a possibility.” And I asked him, “You want to explore it because you think the theatre has a mandate to do this or are we exploring it because you think it may really reveal something about this play to our society that’s useful?” I was curious about the intentionality behind that because this play is heavily steeped in identity, you know? And this is a very particular story. I didn’t want to move the time and take it out of 1968, because I think that’s unnecessary and just adds further complications that I didn’t think would serve the audience. In interviews, when Miller was talking about his impetus for writing this, he explained that he felt at the time that we had a disregard for our history. So, this really is a play about honoring the pursuit of looking back at our history to figure out where we’re headed. Remember: there weren’t too many ethnicities en masse that lost $2 million dollars in 1929 in the stock market crash. That wasn’t a thing. We really weren’t allowed to participate in that way. I get the curiosity of doing it, I get the desire to want to be inclusive, but when appropriate. There’s a time and a place for everything and for me to honor this story, which is always my number one goal as a director and as an actor. What are the intentions of the playwright and how can I best be in service to that? So, I thought changing the ethnicity for this play would cause more haze in an already dense play to where we couldn’t really see ourselves. I just trusted the universality would come through, much like in an August Wilson play.
RF: As director, what are your thoughts of Miller’s intention that this serious play opens and closes with the artificial sound of laughter?
BD: Yeah, that has been so fascinating. It’s the canned quality of the laughter to suggest that you can have it on demand.
RF: Hollow.
BD: Yes, the idea of a laugh. Words like “fantasy” and “illusion” and “it was all a dream” are in the play. All these characters are questioning what is real to them. “Was I stupid for believing this? Why can’t I believe what I see?” So, this idea of canned laughter is about this embodiment of true joy and how a laugh implicates some kind of freedom to a degree. That I’m free enough to enjoy something in a way. At the start of the play when Walter puts the laughing record on the phonograph and starts laughing along with it, it takes on a whole new life. Is he laughing because he actually finds it funny? Or is he laughing because that’s an entry point into a better memory of his childhood that is now endearing him towards the events of this play? Is he now having a personal connection with this stuff and misremembering it as something that once brought him joy?
RF: And for the actor it’s a field day. He can use one memory one night and one memory another.
BD: And the bookend of the play with Solomon, the salesman who comes to buy all the old furniture, and his being alone on stage with the laughing record, brings up an anxiety in him over what he’s just purchased. Did he do the right thing? We explored with whether or not when the needle hits the record is it a feeling of “Are they laughing at me? Am I really just the world’s biggest fool for doing this at eighty-nine years old?”
RF: As many of Miller’s best-known works are shaped by his experience growing up during the Depression (The Price is certainly one of them), what are your feelings about how the play resonates in today’s uncertain economy?
BD: When Justin pitched this play to me, we were in a different time. Trump hadn’t been elected, we didn’t have these tariffs and an economic anxiety on full display that we’re experiencing now. Now, though we’re not in another Great Depression, there’s a fear of the unsteadiness of our economic situation and people are behaving badly—much of it out of fear. And that combined with the idea of American Exceptionalism, which I wholeheartedly believe Miller is trying to shine a light on, taps into something that’s at the foundational core of why America became America in the first place. It’s really about the ability to rise above any circumstances as an individual to where you can be self-sufficient and inoculate yourself against any fear of just being poor, or lacking, and not having. I guess the mandate is that you be self-sufficient enough for you to do that and provide for you and your family on your own, with no respect or consideration for community. And I think that’s where we are again and why we’re in such a political upheaval. Because so many people have bought into this idea that if you’re not wealthy or on top, that somehow it’s your fault, not some fault of a system or society.
So, it’s a great indictment of some of the things at the foundation of the economic system of what this country is addicted to. And I think this play will always be relevant as long as we’re subscribing to these ideas of what it means to truly be successful and truly be an American, based upon our capitalistic society. And this is ringing with our audiences so far. Miller is still speaking to us today.
The Price is playing through Sunday June 29th at Two River Theatre, 21 Bridge Ave, Red Bank, NJ 07701. For ticket information and for future programing, please visit: https://tworivertheater.org.
Photos by T. Charles Erikson.
